Page 37 of Crucible of Chaos

Estevar Valejan Duerisi Borros had travelled across his adopted homeland dozens of times, investigated wonders and horrors aplenty, but until that moment, not even the King’s Crucible could claim to have witnessed a man being torn apart by demons.

CHAPTER 23

DEMONS

Estevar took the stairs two at a time, heedless of the exhaustion and injury that threatened to send him hurtling down the spiralling staircase, breaking an arm or a leg or perhaps even his skull. Though he clung to a faint hope that some trick of the storm had deceived him, the memory was a white-hot cattle brand burning itself forever onto his eyes, and a creeping intuition was warning him that if he failed to reach the statuary before Strigan was slain, more than just the Wolf-King’s life would be lost.

The tormented monk’s screams followed him down the winding stairs, rising and then fading in volume each time he passed one of the narrow windows. New sounds began to drown them out: the disbelieving shouts of Trumpeters spreading word of the attack; the unsheathing of swords; the winding of crossbows in preparation to repel an assault for which such weapons would surely prove as inadequate as Estevar’s own rapier.

Too slow, he thought, his mind racing far faster than his body could manage. He imagined himself watching from above, staring down at this lumbering fool whose arrogance in believing he had any role to play in what was unfolding outside was worthy only of derision. What propelled him onwards– whathauntedhim–was a vision that refused to be banished: a vision of hell made real.

Five of them, he’d counted, shaped like parodies of men but with short horns of varying shapes adorning hairless white skulls. Their limbs were equally pale, and stretched too long, looking too slender for the fearsome strength they displayed. Four of the assailants had been holding Strigan’s wrists and ankles, effortlessly resisting his mad writhing. The fifth. . . Saint Eloria-whose-screams-draw-blood, the fifth was flaying him with fingernails long as knives, slicing sigils into his flesh with the same casual adroitness as Mother Leogado carved her wooden figurines. The eyes were the worst, though: narrow slits of the brightest blue Estevar had ever seen, cutting through the fog like the beams of mirror-backed lanterns.

At long last, Estevar reached the bottom of the stairs, where it took every ounce of his not inconsiderable strength to heave the massive wooden bar from its brackets across the tower entrance. His confiscated rapier was leaning against the wall and he grabbed it as he burst out the door, nearly tripping down the smaller steps he’d forgotten were there. In the unnatural darkness and haze it took him a moment to find his bearings. He was facing the abbey gates– the opposite direction from the statuary. Turning so swiftly that he nearly twisted his ankle, he took off at a run towards the path to the statuary.

He could see nothing at first. The rains might have stopped, but the cursed, unpredictable fog had not yet lifted. As he ran, he heard the thumping of sandalled feet, swords and crossbows rattling and clanking. A squad of Trumpeters were close on his heels.

‘Keep your fingers off those triggers until I tell you otherwise,’ he shouted in the most commanding tone his breathless lungs could deliver. The last thing he needed now was to be shot in the arse by a monk with a twitchy finger.

The haze was so thick that he ran headlong into the closed iron gate blocking his path. Cursing, he swung it open, the screech of the hinges no match for the terrified shrieks of poor Strigan being tortured just a few paces ahead.

As Estevar stalked forward, his rapier blade out in front of him, he saw first the glinting of sapphire-blue eyes. A few more steps brought him inside the ruins, where desecration and cruelty had become a gleeful dance performed in defiance of all that could once have been called holy.

The five creatures moved in sickening harmony: one would let go of a limb, only to grab the next, as they rotated the body, sending it round and round so that each got their turn to slice open the black-ink tattoos with their sharpened claws, the same sigils now written in their victim’s blood. The first, fleeting tableau he’d witnessed from the watchtower had failed to capture their manic grins, but grin the creatures did, even nodding happily to Estevar as if inviting him to partake of their mischief. Now that he was closer, he could hear their chanting, a whispered song of hisses and hideous slurps, as they bent their heads so they could lap at Strigan’s wounds.

They’re cutting into the tattoos with their claws to turn what had before been mere ink into bloody inscriptions– why?

‘Gods, save us!’ one of the Trumpeters called out behind him.

To which god do you plead, he wondered,and would eventheydare intervene against monstrosities such as these?

Strigan’s head came up, his eyes wide with terror. When he saw Estevar, he screamed, ‘Eminence,please! Please save me!’

A few of the Trumpeters fired their crossbows, ignoring Estevar’s previous admonition. One of the bolts nearly took out his left ear before flying off into the mists. The other two were better aimed, yet the shafts split apart before they touched the leathery white skin of Strigan’s tormentors.

From atop the tower, a forceful voice shouted to her troops, ‘Retreat! Back inside the tower, all of you. Whatever fate the heretic has brought upon himself, we cannot risk the defence of the abbey for one man!’

The yellow-garbed monks required no further urging. Their footsteps quickly faded to silence as they withdrew from the field of battle. When Estevar looked down at his own feet, he saw that he too had– quite without his own volition–begun to retreat.

‘Eminence,please!’ Strigan cried, in between petrified gasps.

Eminence, Estevar repeated to himself. Never before had he heard the title spoken with such desperate reverence.There’s nothing I can do for him, he told himself, still staring at the ground, unable to meet the eyes of the man he was abandoning.Let this all be a fever-dream from which I’ll soon awake, Caeda shaking her head in disapproval and pointing out that a cantor of the Greatcoats has no business wetting his bed.

Strangely, when he imagined himself looking up at Caeda, it was the face of another he saw there: a face a few years younger, not nearly as pretty. A short woman, plain and utterly unimpressive, reputed to lack even modest skill with a blade. Chalmers was no one’s vision of a duelling magistrate, let alone the First Cantor of the Greatcoats. Many of his fellows had threatened to leave the order upon hearing of her elevation–the undeserved gift of an even younger and less deserving King Filian the First at the behest of the former First Cantor, Falcio val Mond.

‘How did you do it?’ Estevar had asked her on being summoned to receive his orders from her. He’d come to Castle Aramor fully intending to turn in his coat, knowing she meant to force him to resume his judicial circuits, thus curtailing his passion for investigating the supernatural. But when he’d come face to face with her in the Greatcoats’ wardroom, he could think only of the stories he’d heard of the war with Avares, how Chalmers had been selected by Falcio himself to perform the dreaded Scorn Ride. Alone astride her horse, this bare slip of a woman had ridden the enemy’s front line as thousands of bloodthirsty warriors had grabbed for her, driven half mad by the insult of a girl being sent, bellowing their vows to tear her apart. Tristia had won great respect– and perhaps been saved from an invasion it could not withstand–when Chalmers had not only ridden the entire line, but then turned back to do so a second time.

‘How did I do it?’ she’d asked, repeating his question as if at first she couldn’t fathom the answer herself. Her hands began to shake and her bottom lip quivered at the memory. Estevar recognised such signs; he knew that not a night could have gone by since that fateful ride when she hadn’t shuddered awake, still feeling those hands grabbing at her.

Somehow, though, she managed to still herself, to meet his eyes and answer,‘I remembered what it is we claim to be.’

‘Which is?’ he’d asked dubiously.

Once again her gaze was drawn far away, yet she was calm now, and he sensed he was seeing her just as the Avarean warriors had on that fateful day. ‘The Greatcoats have to be more than judges, Estevar. We have to embody the law itself. The verdicts aren’t enough. We have to be the proof that some ideals–humanideals, like justice and decency–are more powerful than armies, more righteous than gods.’ She’d laughed then, awkwardly, the way she did everything. ‘It’s terribly arrogant of us, don’t you think? But if we claim to represent the law, only to allow ourselves to be cowed through fear and intimidation, then there’s really no law at all, is there?’

Those words had echoed in his thoughts after he’d relented and set off to ride his gods-be-damned judicial circuit. It was those words that now gave him the strength to draw his rapier, stride into the ruins where the statues of dead gods lay at the feet of those foul creatures presently inscribing their atrocities into the lapsed monk’s flesh, and declare in a voice as deep and steady as had ever been heard within that abbey, ‘Be you demons, devils or the gods reborn, my name is Estevar Valejan Duerisi Borros, the King’s Crucible, summoned here to restore justice to this troubled place. Release that man now, damn you, or form a line so that one by one you may pit your foul magic against my steel!’

CHAPTER 24

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